Somehow, Cleveland has survived, with her gray banner unfurled -- the banner of Archangelsk and Detroit, of Kharkov and Liverpool -- the banner of men and women who would settle the most ignominious parts of the earth, and there, with the hubris born neither of faith nor ideology but biology and longing, bring into the world their whimpering replacements.
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READIN
READIN started out as a place for me
to keep track of what I am reading, and to learn (slowly, slowly)
how to design a web site.
There has been some mission drift
here and there, but in general that's still what it is. Some of
the main things I write about here are
reading books,
listening to (and playing) music, and
watching the movies. Also I write about the
work I do with my hands and with my head; and of course about bringing up Sylvia.
The site is a bit of a work in progress. New features will come on-line now and then; and you will occasionally get error messages in place of the blog, for the forseeable future. Cut me some slack, I'm just doing it for fun! And if you see an error message you think I should know about, please drop me a line. READIN source code is PHP and CSS, and available on request, in case you want to see how it works.
See my reading list for what I'm interested in this year.
READIN has been visited approximately 236,737 times since October, 2007.
La culpa is (must be said first of all, and I am after all just starting out reading it) an amazing, wonderful book. I have two questions about the setting; I'm hoping someone reading my notes will be able to clue me in.
Also, I wonder how much language difficulty is to be expected for a Porteño hitchhiking in southern Brazil. Communication with all of the people he interacts with seems to be pretty trouble-free -- or any troubles communicating are not based on language barrier -- and the dialog is written in Spanish, but it has crossed my mind to wonder if they are speaking Spanish, Portuguese, or something in-between.
Some really striking passages are popping up in this collection of Giuseppe Ungaretti's poetry. Sound, listening, singing, sirens,...
y el mar es ceniciento
tiembla dulce inquieto
como una paloma
Agua confusa
como el ruido de popa que escucho
en la sombra
del
sueño
Hay niebla que nos borra
Tal vez nace un rÃo por aquÃ
Escucho el canto de las sirenas
El sol roba la ciudad
No se ve más
Ni siquiera las tumbas resisten demasiado
Below the fold a stunning elegy. Who is the translator? Not credited in the linked file -- possibly it is Luis Muñoz, his is the only name I am finding as a translator for Ungaretti in a few tries via Google.
I never realized this -- yesterday I was thinking about the King Midas legend (amid all the talk of wealth passing me right by...) and it occurred to me that Midas' golden touch must be, loosely and remotely, a root for Vonnegut's idea of ice-9.
A great party this evening! Some friends gave me books. Thanks, Janis! Thanks, Mariana!
Becoming Jimi Hendrix
Antigua vida mÃa
Manual de pintura y caligrafÃa
El siglo de las sombras
La culpa
Peanuts Guide to Life
Other friends gave me bottles of wine, also much appreciated; and Ellen and Sylvia gave me a spatula in the form of a Stratocaster. (Spatucaster? Stratula?)
posted evening of May 18th, 2012: Respond ➳ More posts about Birthdays
That rare treasure arrived in today's mail, a book towards which I have no predjudices one way or the other... All I know about Michael Stutz' Circuits of the Wind is that its protagonist is roughly my coeval and vaguely that he grows up with computers and hacking and such.* A wonderful epigraph from Ecclesiastes sheds a little light on the title:
The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north ; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits.
I'm sort of sniffing around the edges of the book trying to figure out how to approach it now, looking at the epigraphs and the dedication and acknowledgements (to among others, "the gurus, Daniel Frank Kirk [this Daniel F Kirk? this Daniel Kirk?] and Irwin Allen Ginsberg" and "Bill Burroughs for the blessing")... Some fun stuff.
*(Well and that its author considers READIN a worthy target for a review copy, which I'll grant is a big prejudicial point in his favor.)
posted evening of May 16th, 2012: Respond ➳ More posts about Epigraphs
Two birds beautiful of wing and close companions sit on the same tree.
One eats the sweet fruit, the other watches from above.
Our two selves sit on the tree of life, one seer, full of light and love, the
other consumer, eating the sweet fruit. Shaking sin and virtue from its wings
and becoming stainless, the consumer becomes a seer and sorrows cease
